[4][5] Love traveled to Dodge City, Kansas, where he found work as a cowboy with cattle drivers from the Duval Ranch (located on the Palo Duro River in the Texas Panhandle).

[4] He wrote in his autobiography that he met Pat Garrett, Bat Masterson, Billy the Kid, and others while working the cattle drives in Arizona.

[4] After driving a herd of cattle to the rail head in Deadwood, Dakota Territory, he claimed to have entered a rodeo on the 4th of July in 1876, enticed by the $200 prize money.

It was at this rodeo that he claims friends and fans gave him the nickname "Deadwood Dick",[5][7] a reference to a literary character created by Edward Lytton Wheeler, a dime novelist of the day.

[4] In October 1877, Nat Love wrote that he was captured by a band of Pima Indians while rounding up stray cattle near the Gila River in Arizona.

[4] Love left the cowboy life before he settled down, and married a woman named Alice Owens, in Denver, Colorado, on August 2, 1888.

[citation needed] In 2012, his story was featured in the graphic novel Best Shot in the West by Patricia and Fredrick McKissack (script) and Randy DuBurke (drawings).

[9] In 2022, the Denver Art Museum displayed Nat Love, A Cowboy's Life, a comic adaptation of his autobiography, written and drawn by R. Alan Brooks and colored by Lonnie MF Allen.